Story 2
by regalwizard
Summary: Another grade school reject story.


The trees passed in a green blur under my wings. I paid no heed to the passing landscape, as my eyes were firmly fastened on the chopper ahead of me. It was a private helicopter, owned by one of those rich, snobby hunter families. This one contained a father/son combination. Daddy was teaching his baby boy the fine art of killing helpless animals from the air.   
  
Being a shape shifter definitely has its advantages. Take ye typical jet plane for example. A jet plane can go faster than any bird on this planet. Now, if a bird as powerful as an eagle could change to the same size as a jet, then it could easily out distance it. This is basically what I did. Only instead of increasing my overall size, I simply increased the size of my wings.   
  
I quickly caught up to the chopper and, changing my wings back, flew down to the cabin of the chopper. You know in the movies, they'll have something on top of a car or plane lean down to look in the windshield and scare the hell out of the driver or pilot? That has got to be one of my all-time favourite tricks. As the chopper headed for the cliff at break-neck speed, I reached out with my mind and stopped the hunters hearts. Just a little insurance. I hate it when they come out alive. It just makes more work for me.   
  
I cleared the chopper with two strokes of my wings, and watched in triumph as the chopper tried to move the cliff, and inevitably failed with a fiery explosion. I love that cliff. Not only is it great for smashing choppers against, but it's excellent for dropping from when carrying a burden that's too big to jump up with. As I alighted upon the terrace, one of the members of the local cat clan came to great me.   
  
"Good morning, O Great Protector." The cat's words were clear and sharp in my mind. "The bovines are in the south clearing, the furry-claws are near the bee hives, and the thin-legs are currently in the watering hole."   
  
The cats are wonderful creatures, but my Gods are they ever pompous and stubborn. They have an inherent need to use big, fancy-sounding words so they can feel important. For example, bovines are cows, furry-claws are bears, and thin-legs are deer. And believe-you-me, they are the ones insisting on the 'O Great Protector' crap. I hate it. It makes me feel like one of those hunter family members, giving themselves fancy names to make themselves seem big.   
  
I responded with the usual courtesies, quickly changed into a wolf, and bounded off into the woods. One thing that I had very quickly discovered about the cats is that they have an absolute mortal fear of wolves. This never ceases to amuse me, since the local wolves are so tame that grass does more damage then they do. As I padded up to the watering hole, I sent out 'feelers' to see which of the deer would be good for taking. I generally go for ones with good coats and plenty of flesh on them. I got six of them, two of them fine bucks with huge racks on them.   
  
I changed into a dragon and, taking up the carcasses, headed for home. When I got home, I skinned, cut, and cured the meat. Then I cleaned the skin, and put it in rose-scented water to soak over night. When you do this to fresh skins, it gets rid of the feral smell, and leaves the scent of whatever you put in the water.   
  
There's not much to my life. I wake, I hunt, I eat, I kill trespassing humans, I sleep, it starts all over again. Every hundred years or so, there's a forest fire, so I have to round up the animals and put them in my fire-proof, underground home, while I go out and keep the humans from interfering with nature. And if it means burning a few hundred or thousand humans to death, then I'll do it, without so much as blinking an eye.   
  
We were getting near the time for another fire, so I was going out more often then normal, keeping an eye out for any smoke or flames. That's pretty well how I stumbled across the gate. I had spotted a thick column of black smoke roiling up from a clearing. Odd shaped clearing. Perfectly circular. Wait a minute. There didn't use to be a clearing there. Curious now, I glided over, changing my wings to those of an owl to be as quiet as possible. As I went, I searched (with my mind) for any sign of life in the clearing. There was none.   
  
As I cleared the last of the trees, a strange, circular ring rose up out of the smoke. It seemed to be made of some kind of stone, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what. I got the impression that it was something like sapphire. But I could be wrong, since I'm not a big rock expert. (I tend to leave that to the mountain goats). As I glided up to the ring, I noticed a round-ish, sort of cylindrical device a few meters to the left of the ring. The ring and the device had identical symbols on them. The device had some sort of reddish 'bulb' in the middle of it. The ring was actually two rings, one smaller one inside of a larger one. The small one seemed to be held in place by seven squared-off triangles. More like triangles with the tops chopped off. I landed beside the odd-shaped device which, when viewed up close, looked like a flat-topped mushroom.   
  
Suddenly, the small ring started moving - it turned, first clockwise, then counter-clockwise, then back again. As it went, different triangles opened up when it stopped, and then closed again, the insides of them lighting to a bright orange-red colour. After the seventh one lit, this odd, aqua-blue, watery-looking thing filled the inner ring, flew out in a rounded, cylindrical shape, and then went back to the ring and flattened out.   
  
As I stood there wondering what I should do, an odd-looking machine came out of the watery curtain with a sound like something being pulled out of mud. If it had been an animal, I think I would have killed myself laughing. It had a tiny head, a long, skinny neck, and a huge body. It had swung its head away from me, and was obviously looking around. I quickly made myself invisible so the thing wouldn't see me. After it had wandered around a bit, it went back to the gate and the watery curtain, which promptly dissipated, leaving the machine and the rings, which I had first seen.   
  
I noticed then that I was very hungry, so I went wolf and headed out to hunt down a deer. After a couple of hours, I wandered my way back to the ring clearing. When I got to the edge, I saw that the ring was lighting up. The sixth triangle was lit, and even as I watched, the seventh triangle lit up, and that blue, watery curtain appeared, same as before. I hadn't changed to my own form yet, so I was well blended in.   
  
A minute passed, and nothing happened. Then, with separate little 'shloop' sounds, four armed people came out of the rings. They were dressed in some kind of army fatigues, and carried what looked like machine guns, pistols, and a couple of weird looking things that I presumed to be weapons. One of the things looked like a stick with bulges at either end, and a bulge in the middle. The other looked like a vertically squished 'Z'. The people also had a few boxes that they carried between them.   
  
There were three males and one female. Being a wolf, I automatically assumed that the lone female was the leader of the group, as it was in most small packs. It turned out that I was wrong, as the grey-haired, older male started giving out orders. One of the males had brown hair, and odd, wiry things holding some unmeltable ice in front of his eyes. (Of course I knew they were glasses. It's just that when I'm in wolf form, I think like a wolf). The other male had no hair, had brown skin, and some weird symbol on his forehead. He was the one holding the bulging stick thing. The female had light coloured hair, and looked like she didn't want to be there. They put down the boxes and followed a deer trail that wandered through the woods.   
  
Curious, I followed them, keeping to the bushes where they couldn't see me. After a couple of hours, they had started to become paranoid, suspecting that something or someone was following them. They came to one of the watering holes and stopped. I hid myself behind a bramble bush, and waited to see what the people would do. The older man spoke to the man with the glasses, and the guy with the glasses pulled out some kind of device. He did something with it, turning slowly from side to side. Suddenly, he stopped, facing towards where I was hiding. He pointed it out to the old man, who gestured to the other two, and then pointed their weapons at my area, slowly moving forward.   
  
I quickly decided to show myself, as opposed to being shot at. I left the bush, rustling a bunch of leaves and branches on my way out. (Just so that they know something's coming. People have a habit of firing their weapons when they're startled). Rather predictably, they followed the noise (and the movement) with the weapons, and were somewhat surprised when they saw a wolf. They lowered their weapons and started talking, sounding fairly relieved. Of course, being a wolf meant that I couldn't understand what they were saying. The female came up to me and started to treat me like a dangerous wild animal - carefully coming closer, not making sudden moves, talking quietly. I got really pissed off at her, so I stood on my hind legs (causing the people to whip out their weapons) and changed back to my normal human form. Unfortunately, I could now understand what they were saying. While they were temporarily speechless, I walked out into the clearing and right into the middle of their little group. They quickly recovered and surrounded me, 'blocking' any escape routes.   
  
"Who are you? What are you? Why have you been following us?" the old man demanded.   
  
"Since you asked so nicely," I replied sarcastically, with a sigh, "I'm Kjrstjn Thorsdottor, I'm a human shape-shifter who's immortal, and I was following you because you're strange humans trespassing in my woods."   
  
"Your woods? What are you, a wood nymph or something?"   
  
"Colonel. I really don't think you should antagonize her. We don't know what she can change into." the female broke in.   
  
The colonel looked at her slightly angrily. It was obvious then that the female was the smartest of the lot of them. I turned to her and asked   
  
"What is your name, smart female?"   
  
(All right. I know it was corny. But I had just changed from wolf form, so I still had some fairly dominant wolf traits in me).   
  
"I...I'm Major Samantha Carter." she replied.   
  
"I hope I haven't stopped in at a bad time, Major Carter. I am known for having bad timing."   
  
"No, not at all. We're part of a larger ... group of people. We explore worlds through the gate, looking for resources and hopefully making alliances with any friendly locals."   
  
"I'm afraid that if any more of your people come through the rings, I'll be forced to detain all and destroy the rings."   
  
"No, no! What I meant was, we have a base on our home planet that we travel through the gate from. We travel to other planets, sending one small group through to explore. If the local powers don't want us there, then we go home and lock that planet out of our dialling program. That way, we can't redial that planet."   
  
"So you are but an ambassador from your planet? You have powers of negotiation, means of communication with your superiors?"   
  
"Yes, provided we can come to a mutual arrangement."   
  
We bantered back and forth for a while, then eventually came to a "mutual arrangement". Carter went over to talk to her group leader, and I went to the side of the clearing to wait. It took Carter over an hour to convince the leader to come over and talk to me. It took me almost two hours of quick talking to convince him to let me transport them (telekinetically) back to the rings.   
  
When we got there, the man with the glasses went to the weird device thing and started pressing some of the symbols on it. As he did this, the ring started moving, matching symbols with what he was pushing. Shortly, the curtain was up, and the leader was talking to someone on the other side, using the machine/animal thing. After a few minutes, the leader turned and asked me to step through the rings. Apparently, their leader wanted to talk to me personally.   
  
At first, I was somewhat afraid to go through the curtain, but Carter convinced me that I would be fine. (One of my biggest fears was of how I would react, being put among all those humans. Over the millennia, I had grown so used to killing every human that wandered into sight that it was completely automatic, I didn't notice it at all). When I walked through the curtain, it felt like walking into a wall of water, only I didn't get wet. When I emerged, I saw, at a glance, easily thirty people gathered at or near the end of the ramp that lead to the rings. My first reaction was to give my usual roar of anger (intended, normally, as a warning), and started to change into a dragon. Needless to say, this did not get things off to a good start. At my roar, about half of the people levelled guns at me. Luckily for me (and for the people), Carter jumped in front of me and grabbed onto my shoulders.   
  
"Kjrstjn stop! They're friendly! They're not going to hurt you or your woods!"   
  
Carter had to literally scream to get my attention, but it worked. I quickly changed back, and began alternately cursing myself and apologizing profusely for what I did. Seven hours later, I was walking back through the gate, heading home. I had a small device that they called a DHD, and a mental picture of which symbols to press, and in what sequence they should be pressed.   
  
I had meant to get back to them within the week, but it ended up taking me over two months. A fire had started on the southern plains, and I was kept extremely busy killing the humans. By the time the fire had burned itself out, I had killed at least a billion people, plus burned a dozen towns. As it was, SG1 (the group Carter was in) came through to see what was holding me up. I was home at the time, and felt four now-familiar minds suddenly come 'on'. I knew immediately that the team had just come through the gate, so I reached out with my mind and transported them right into the room I was in.   
  
"Are you going to do that every time we come here?" Colonel O'Neal asked sourly.   
  
"Only when I can't come to greet you personally. Aside from that, be prepared to be zapped away." I replied in a fake, cheerful voice.   
  
"What happened to the forest?" Carter asked. "We opened the gate about a month ago and sent a probe through. When we got the video feed, everything was a raging inferno. We get here, and everything's burned to a crisp."   
  
"We had our hundred-year fire roar through here. It started just over two months ago, just about the same time I got back from your home. I was too busy keeping the humans away to get anywhere near the gate."   
  
"Don't you do anything to stop the fire from destroying the forest?" asked Dr. Jackson (the guy with the glasses).   
  
"If I did that, then the trees would become diseased, the animals would become ill, the humans would take over the woods, and I'd be kicked out of my home."   
  
That started me and Jackson off on a long talk about ethics. I broke off long enough to give the other three permission to explore the place, but otherwise, it took me over two hours to convince him that what I was doing was proper ethics for this planet. He was an open-minded guy, so it wasn't as hard as it could otherwise be.   
  
We quickly found the others and started hammering out the myriad of details that went with the alliance. A few hours later, we finished with one end of the deal (their leader had to work on his end), and I took them out to meet the cat clan on the bluff. I think I scared O'Neal by changing into a dragon and insisting we fly. He simply did not understand the distance involved in getting from my place to the bluff. It took us three hours to fly there. O'Neal started complaining about the time involved, at least until I pointed out that it would have taken almost three weeks if we had walked.   
  
When we landed, I called the clan leader, asking her to bring the whole clan. She sent back a message, saying that it was currently impossible, as a pack of wolves was in the way. With a resigned sigh, I turned and told SG1 what was going on (and the history of the cats and the wolves). They opted to walk, and within half an hour, we stumbled upon the wolf pack. A few shots fired over their heads quickly got rid of them.   
  
We wandered into the clan's den after about ten minutes. Clan dens are basically just a long tunnel, with hundreds of passages off to the sides. If more room is needed, the cats just dig more side-dens, and dig further underground. We went to the communal den, where every clan member was gathered. We rounded the last corner, and entered a huge cavern, with lots of shelves and terraces, each and every spot crammed with cats. SG1 stopped dead in their tracks, awed by the number of cats staring at them.   
  
Ten hours later, we were winging our way back to the gate to send the team home. I saw them off, changed to an eagle, and went to the nearest town to see how they were fairing after the fire. The first town I flew over showed no signs of life at all. (Not surprising. I had hit that town pretty hard. All that was left was a few brick outlines). The next town to the north was still smouldering, and the same as the first. The next town, however, looked almost like I hadn't gone anywhere near it. There were people all over the place. Markets were booming, women were doing laundry in the river, men were drilling out on the training grounds, and children were playing in the school playground.   
  
I spiralled further up, and saw that the town was actually closer to the forest then it used to be. The people had simply rebuilt the town to the south of the old site! Extremely angry now, I quickly went dragon, and let out a fiery roar. I thundered down, breathing flame the whole way down. I skimmed over to the river and burned the women to death, sped to the playground and crisped the kids. I then turned, beating and flaming my way over the market, into the training grounds. The men had, foolishly, clustered in a little group, so I incinerated them with a quick shot. I flew about five miles from the town, turned, and set fire to everything, stone, wood, metal, bodies (live and dead), and all man-made items.   
  
With a mighty roar, a column of fire charged up into the air, over a hundred miles in height. I created a cloud and sat down on it, watching as the entire town burned to ashes. I set the cloud on a course around the forest edges, about a hundred miles up, and fifty miles from the edges. I went along, keeping an eye out for any more towns. By the time I got back to my original starting point, I had incinerated two large cities, fifteen towns, and over a thousand villages of various sizes and populations.   
  
When I was done, I had calmed down enough to think clearly. I winged my way home, and dealt with the myriad of detail work that needed to be done around the house. I had just finished when I felt eighty-two minds come on, meaning that eighty-two people had just come through the gate. I changed into an eagle, transported myself to a spot a little ways from the gate, and started to curse vehemently at what greeted my eyes.   
  
There were eighty-two people; all dressed in what SG1 had told me were the clothes of the Tok'ra, a race of people that their planet had allied with. They were carrying a bunch of stuff, some of which looked like camping equipment. Sure enough, the group spread out from the gate, and started setting up tents. I was angry with this, so I changed to my human form and flew down, right into the middle of their fledgling camp. I had been a fair ways up, so most of the people had seen me, and pointed me out to someone, who I took to be their leader. The leader walked up, beaming, as if he was greeting an old friend he hadn't seen in many years. I stopped him with a quick growl.   
  
"Who the hell are you, and what are you doing, setting up camp without my permission?" I snarled.   
  
"I'm the leader of the Tok'ra allied force from the SGC. We're here to help you recover from the fire that swept through here earlier."   
  
"Look boy. I've been recovering from fires for longer then you can imagine, without any help at all. I appreciate the offer, but frankly, you can go right back where you came from."   
  
I snapped my fingers, and all the unpacked gear was packed again. I turned to the dialling device, quickly punched up the SGC, activated the DHD, and put a stick partway through the curtain, to hold the gate open. I levelled my right hand at the scattered group, raised my hand, and sent the now-elevated group through the gate. Once they were all through, I went over, picked up the stick, and went through. When I got to the other side, I located SG1 easily, and transported myself, the team, and the general (who happened to be with them) into the general's office.   
  
"What the hell's the deal, sending people over to my planet, without consulting me?"   
  
"What the hell's the deal with hauling us in here like this?" demanded O'Neal.   
  
"I'll ask the questions!" I thundered. "Who said that those damned Tok'ra could come onto my planet? I want them brought before me immediately."   
  
"I was the one who approved the Tok'ra excursion. From what SG1 told me, it seemed like you needed as much help as possible." the general replied.   
  
"If you insist on sending unauthorized people to my planet, then our tentative alliance will have to end."   
  
"What will you do if we do break off?"   
  
"I'll destroy my gate, for one thing. If I'm mad, then I'll destroy the whole complex, then destroy my gate."   
  
"But why don't you want any help?"   
  
"I prefer to do things naturally, let things take their own course."   
  
We talked back and forth for a few minutes, resulting in the alliance being withdrawn on both sides. I went home and, once the curtain had disappeared, set fire to the ring and the dialling device. It took it over five hours to burn, which was unusual, as normal rock takes about one hour. Once it was burned down, I transported the ashes into a black hole in some far-off universe. I've never been there, but it's a really handy thing to have. You can put all sorts of things in it. I generally put all the bodies and ashes from burnt out buildings in the black hole. 


End file.
